Dan Wolken: NCAA had little choice but to clear Masoli to play immediately

Transfer quarterback Jeremiah Masoli has won his appeal and can play immediately for Ole Miss.

AP Photo/Oxford Eagle, Bruce Newman

Jeremiah Masoli probably has no business playing big-time college football this year, but if the NCAA wanted to shut down his transfer to Ole Miss, this week wasn't the time to do it.

Boxed in by its casual approach toward graduate student transfers the last few years, the NCAA had little choice Friday but to overturn its initial ruling on Masoli, who is now free to play quarterback for the Rebels today against Jacksonville State.

"We would like to thank the NCAA staff and subcommittee for approaching this case and all of its details with diligence and fairness," Ole Miss athletic director Pete Boone said in a university release.

It's quite clear that Masoli did not transfer from Oregon in July to pursue a master's degree at Ole Miss in parks and recreation management. He transferred to escape his circumstances. After pleading guilty to a January burglary charge and a marijuana possession charge from June, Oregon dismissed Masoli from the team, and Ole Miss was his best option.

Under those circumstances, rewarding Masoli with a safe landing in the SEC and the ability to play right away is clearly not in the spirit of what the NCAA wants its rules to represent.

But Tuesday's decision that Masoli had to sit out the 2010 season and wait for 2011 was so clearly against precedent, Ole Miss' appeal practically wrote itself. How could the NCAA tell Masoli to sit when Kenneth Cooper, a basketball player who was dismissed from Louisiana Tech, played immediately at UAB last season as a graduate student under the same rule?

What message would it have sent if the NCAA denied Masoli but allowed former Ole Miss basketball player Eniel Polynice to compete this season as a graduate transfer for Seton Hall when Andy Kennedy suspended him toward the end of last season and then told him to move along after the NIT?

Given a choice between a principled decision and a consistent one, the NCAA Division 1 Subcommittee for Legislative Relief chose the latter.

Hopefully, the NCAA will now use this uncomfortable but necessary reversal as an opportunity to make drastic changes to the graduate transfer rule, which essentially turns athletes with degrees and eligibility into college free agents. While its intent may be pure -- allowing academically oriented players to pursue graduate programs their original schools don't offer -- it has instead become a way for coaches to plug recruiting holes with one-year rentals.

Did basketball player John Fields transfer from UNC-Wilmington to Tennessee this year because of a sports management program or because he saw an opportunity to play at a higher level and Bruce Pearl needed a backup center?

Did 7-foot center Tom Herzog transfer from Michigan State to UCF for academic reasons, or because he wanted to go from a mop-up guy on a Final Four team to a rotation player on a mediocre team?

Like those athletes, Masoli met the NCAA's only specific requirements to get a waiver of the usual one-year transfer rule: He had his undergraduate degree, and he was enrolled in a graduate program not offered by his previous school. Whether or not he was in good standing with the football team at Oregon is a component that had never been applied before and clearly was too weak to stand up on appeal.

"I want to thank the NCAA committee for its decision. And a huge thank you to Coach (Houston) Nutt and Ole Miss for standing by me," Masoli wrote on his website. "I give all glory to God for helping me through all of this. Now, let's play some football!"

The NCAA wasn't alone in disliking the way Masoli used the graduate transfer loophole to land at Ole Miss. But even for an organization that frequently gets critiqued for dispensing justice without consistency, sitting Masoli out this season would have been a stretch.

Ultimately, the NCAA was smart to back away from a flimsy interpretation of its own rule. Had Masoli not been able to play, would it not have called into question the motives of every graduate transfer since the rule began? That's surely not a road the NCAA wants to go down, lest it would discover that the vast majority of these transfers were -- Surprise! -- about athletics, not academics.

In this particular case, it was too late for the NCAA to re-write the rulebook, so Masoli had to play -- even if watching him today will feel completely wrong.